Reading the Invisible Hand: An Epistemological Consideration

Within the discipline of economics, as within all academic disciplines, scholars produce texts in which they examine, discuss, and sometimes invoke their intellectual predecessors. As historians of economic thought, we are faced with the task of evaluating the readings put forward by these scholars. In this article, I argue that to adequately evaluate such readings one must understand the inalienable role that a scholar's epistemological framework plays in the conditioning of their reading of historical texts and concepts. To do so, I examine two divergent readings of Adam Smith: Jacob Viner's reading of Smith's invisible hand as God and Paul Samuelson's reading of the same three words as an allocative mechanism that translates an individual's “selfish” actions into the public good or “the best good of all” within a state of perfect competition. These distinct readings from two North American economists with remarkably similar historical, geographical, and academic contexts provide the ideal case for exploring the manner in which readers' differing epistemological commitments shape their different readings of historical concepts and texts. I embed my exploration of these readings and the manner in which they are epistemologically conditioned within the wider discussion around an interpretation put forward by Quentin Skinner. In doing so, I offer an account of the variance in readings of ‘the invisible hand’ and thus contribute toward the contemporary revisionist Smithian literature that explores, criticizes, and revises dominant readings of Smith.